Let Employees Be People

Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey, both of Harvard, discuss what they’ve learned from studying radically transparent organizations where people at all levels of the hierarchy get candid feedback, show vulnerability, and grow on the job. Their book is An Everyone Culture.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Sarah Green Carmichael. I’m talking today with Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey, both of Harvard University, and co-authors of the new book, An Everyone Culture– Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization. Thank you both for coming here today.

LISA LAHEY: Our pleasure.

ROBERT KEGAN: Thank you.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So one of the things you guys point out right in the beginning of the book is that in an organization, all of us have this second job that we’re kind of doing all the time. Where it’s we’re managing how we come across. We’re trying to hide our weaknesses. We’re trying to influence what other people think about us.

And one of the provocative questions you ask in the book is, what would it be like if we didn’t have to do that all the time? This is so much a part of organizational life that I actually have trouble imagining what that would look like. So tell me a little bit about that second job, and then help me picture what it would look like to not have to do that.

ROBERT KEGAN: Yeah, so it’s hard for people to even get their heads around how much energy they’re spending looking good. It’s good to just think first, what are the costs of this? We’re developmental psychologists, right? We believe in the possibility of continuing growth and development in adulthood.

If I’m spending part of my energy hiding my weaknesses and my inadequacies, it’s much less likely that I’m going to overcome them. So work immediately becomes not a place where I’m likely to keep growing and developing. From the employer’s side, the employer is paying a full-time salary, so to speak, for a part-time job, having to continue to, in a sense, pay for my limitations. So when you step back from it and look at it, you say, well, this is a ridiculous kind of bargain that benefits no one. So that’s the problem.

LISA LAHEY: Ridiculous, but ubiquitous.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yes.

LISA LAHEY: So what would it look like to do otherwise? Here we start with this idea that, actually, we are covering up actual weaknesses that we have. Well, imagine that you see your weaknesses as an opportunity, an opportunity to actually grow, an opportunity for you to learn how to do something differently. But to the extent that we’re covering it up, we ourselves aren’t even really connected to what is it that we are really up against here.

And if you could see, I actually have permission here. Not only permission, but I’m required in my work here to look carefully at how am I getting in my own way so that I become more mindful of it and become more able to actually work around it.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: As I’m thinking about articles we’ve published, my own work life, someone who’s getting in their way that way might do things like, a question comes up in a meeting, and they don’t really even understand the question. They don’t signal to other people that they have lost the thread of the conversation. Or, there is a new assignment, and they don’t know how to do it. Instead of volunteering for it, or saying, I’d love to do that, but I don’t know how. They just back away because they’re afraid of failing. Is that the kind of thing you’re–

LISA LAHEY: Those are great examples– great examples. So take the example of I don’t actually get the question that’s here. You don’t want to be exposing that I’m stupid. I’m the only person in the room, you’re assuming, that doesn’t really know. So you learn to be asking, really just being transparent, and saying, I am not following where we’re going here. And could we just take a pause here? And let somebody be responsive.

ROBERT KEGAN: What we did for the book was we weren’t just dreaming up in our own minds what the most powerful incubator for developing your people looked like and just imagining it. We started searching all over the country to see if we could find a few organizations that were actually operating this way. That is what the book is about.

And one of the companies, just to give an example, is a company called Next Jump, it’s an ecommerce business in New York. Just to give you a sense of what does it mean to work on your own personal stuff, maybe because they are oriented to the binary and the computer, they took a lot of complex stuff and they said, let’s try to simplify it. It’s good to be confident. It’s not so good to be so confident that you always think you’re right. And let’s call that what it is– arrogance. It’s good to be humble. It’s not good to be so humble that you’re discrediting yourself. Let’s call that for what that is– insecurity.

You can’t spend 30 minutes with any employee in Next Jump without their letting you know, as quickly as somebody might tell you they’re an introvert or an extrovert, or they’re left-handed or they’re right-handed, they will tell you, I lean arrogant and everybody knows. Because everybody leans a little, or more than a little, in one direction or another. Everybody knows from the boss to the newest hire whether you tend toward arrogance or insecurity. And then that’s a thing that you could be working on continuously.

For example, the first meeting we were at at Next Jump, we talked for a little bit. The first person who asked us a question, Charlie Kim, the CEO of the organization said, before you even answer, I just want to commend Julie, or whoever it was.

Julie leans insecure. And one of our suggestions is that the insecure people tend to talk less and last and later or not at all. So if you lean insecure, when you’re in meetings, try to get your voice in early. And similarly, if you tend to be arrogant, try to wait. So there she was, asking her question. It’s a very simple little example of how you can be continuously working on what, at Next Jump, they call your backhand. Everyone hits the forehand better. Everybody has a backhand.

And the backhand isn’t something you’re hiding away, to go back to where we started in this conversation. It’s not something you’re ashamed of. It’s something you’re continuously bringing out and getting support to get better with.

LISA LAHEY: And I think what’s important about the example, Bob, is everybody has one, so it becomes normalized. It’s not just, ooh, I didn’t understand what was going on here. Everybody has got permission and, really, the request to be self-aware of what are your default ways of keeping yourself small, or not being your biggest, by contrast.

So not only do I know what mine is, but I know what yours is. I know what Bob’s is. And then I am in a position where I can be giving either of the two of you feedback so that you’re in a continuous experience of being bathed by the support and challenges of the people around you.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: This is really interesting. It’s a really high level of feedback. It sounds like there is a lot of management support. Let me ask you a little bit more about the title, because that is something I wondered about as well.

There are two parts of it. An Everyone Culture. So let’s start with everyone. If there are people in organizations who, for whatever reason– their upbringing, or whatever– aren’t fully comfortable being this transparent about their flaws, is that just one of those things where it’s like, well, that person doesn’t fit with the culture, and they’ll probably move on? Or can you totally double down and really do this? Can you do it a little bit? How do you deal with people’s different levels of tolerance for being open about themselves.

ROBERT KEGAN: I’ll just say one thing very quickly. First of all, everybody’s uncomfortable with this kind of culture at the beginning. But I don’t want to give the impression–

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Fair enough.

ROBERT KEGAN: –that, oh, everyone just– I mean, they’re very honest. People will say, I’ve had some of the most painful, uncomfortable experiences in this work setting than any other setting I’ve been in. And then in the very same breath, they will say, and I would never want to work in any other company. So this is not sweetness and light. This is not let’s make everybody happy. This is hard work. I think everybody is a little bit uncomfortable.

LISA LAHEY: Yes. That said, I think that for people who are afraid of the whole idea that they’d actually have to be exposing something about themselves, that their sense of their identity is so privately held, it’s not going to be a very good fit. They will be so uncomfortable that it’s going to be hard for them to really relax and do the learning that is really required.

I would say that it begins with the hiring process, that people are invited into a process that actually replicates some of the dimensions of deliberately developmental organization. And so you’re going to inevitably be asked questions about your proclivity towards, your appetite for, a kind of learning that comes from making mistakes.

So you might be asked a question like, tell us about one of the biggest mistakes you made and what you learned from it. And the idea is for the listener there to be hearing, does the person orient towards really learning? Or is it more like they come forward with a, well, the biggest mistake is I just took on too much work. And I didn’t get everything at an A level. No, that’s really not going to be a very satisfying telling response for a DDO who’s looking for people who are really willing to do the digging in and recognizing there’s a part of them that they have had to learn about that keeps them [INAUDIBLE].

ROBERT KEGAN: I think a lot of this goes back to the second word, the culture thing. Because I think when people imagine themselves in such organizations, they imagine they’re still going to carry on pretty much like you normally do, where you’re essentially orienting to your work as a kind of performance. As long as work is a kind of performance, then the thing you worry about is getting bad reviews and failing.

If you actually think of work as a context for practice, where you’re going to get better, where we hired you because we think you’re good, not because we think you’re perfect. Then you can maybe have a different feeling about this. So I wouldn’t want people to disqualify themselves too quickly from thinking they could work in such an organization. Because I think they’re imagining that what it would be like there is in many ways– because really, these companies are showing us a whole different way of thinking about what work can be for, what it can be about. And until you’ve experienced it that way, it’s hard to know whether it would be something you would actually like.

If you’re a very senior person, you’re not going to be protected in some corner office where there’s seven layers between you and the newest hire. You can expect that newest hire to come up to you, just say, I found you quite confusing in that last meeting. I didn’t understand what you said. And that is part of the natural course of life. So it’s true. Everyone would have some adjusting to do.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: From what I hear, one of the toughest challenges in any organization is cross-generational feedback. So a younger employee giving feedback to an older worker. An older manager giving feedback to someone who’s really just out of college. How do people in these organizations get around that generational divide?

LISA LAHEY: I think it starts, in part, by being very explicit. That what we’re trying to do is create a culture that has got certain conditions where we can be giving one another that feedback. And it is on behalf of each one of our own unfolding. And that is on behalf of the bigger enterprise that we’re all under one umbrella in the organization.

So it is in everybody’s best interest. And can we create some experiments about how to do this and learn from them? So it’s like setting the aspiration, and then giving it a go, and let’s learn from what happens when we give it a go, and make adjustments, but carry on.

ROBERT KEGAN: Two quick pictures came to my mind. Another one of the companies we studied is Decurion. Decurion is a portfolio company. They’re in a number of businesses, but the main one is movie theaters. And the head of that division is an extraordinary woman named Nora Dashwood.

And I remember her telling me a story. This is just at the level of people working in a movie theater at an entry level kind of position. And you have a lot of young people in that position. And you also have retirees and people as a second career.

And she said she’s been in the movie theater business for her entire life, and worked in a very good, big movie chain before she worked with the ArcLight theaters of Decurion. And she said she has never seen it work for young people and older people to be working together in those roles in any other theater but that it works beautifully in these ArcLight theaters. And I think it is because there is this agreed culture that everybody is a learner.

The other picture I think of is the third company is Bridgewater, hedge fund in Connecticut. Its founder is Ray Dalio. He’s a genius. You could be intimidated by him. But everything is very transparent there.

And one of the things that everybody is familiar with is that he was asked to give a presentation to a prospective client. And an employee in his 20s, afterwards, gave him the feedback, I give you a D, Ray, on that presentation. I don’t think you prepared well enough. I think you let us down. This is a guy in his 20s saying this to the founder of the company, right?

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Wow, yeah.

ROBERT KEGAN: And he still had a desk there the next day. I mean, he’s still there.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: I wanted to ask you about blind spots a little bit. Because this is something that you have a chapter on in the book about uncovering your blind spots. And it seems like this is one of the big practical pieces of trying to put this into practice. If some people listening, if us here want to try to uncover some of our own blind spots, what advice would you give? How could we do that?

We can start with that and then talk about, maybe, how would you share that with your colleagues in a way that wasn’t terrifying? Let’s start with uncovering them and recognizing them first. And Lisa, let’s start with you.

LISA LAHEY: The first place I think we’d recommend to start is to be looking at what are some fairly regular practices, or times when you feel like, ooh, I really want to be able to do this thing, but I can’t. So to be looking at your own sources of frustration.

I was just on the phone with somebody yesterday who was desperate to begin to delegate. And she has been trying to do this for many months now. That’s a really good example. It’s something you really want to do, and yet, you see you’re not able to do that. That’s the first step is to just even identify what’s the thing I need to get better at?

And then the practice that we invite people to engage in is when they go through a series of self-reflection questions, the first of which is, so what am I actually doing that works against my effort in this example to delegate? And so somebody will name whatever they’re doing, like OK, I keep it all to myself. Or, I give the work to somebody, but then I’m totally on top of it and micromanaging. OK, great. Perfectly honest. You’re being aware of what your behaviors are that work against yourself.

And then the big aha comes from helping people to see that if they had a friendlier stance towards the part of them that’s enacting these counterproductive behaviors, they’d see they’re actually doing that for a very good reason. It’s a self-protective reason. It’s a way they’re trying to keep themselves safe, but that’s the thing we’re trying to illuminate. And that is their blind spot, which is something they are up to that’s leading them, in this example, to keep holding onto the work.

So it’s like, OK, I want to be the most important person around here. OK, great. You need to have the light go off and see, that’s me. And that’s perfectly normal. Every single one of us has one of these series of these human kinds of blind spots.

ROBERT KEGAN: Yeah. This makes me think it’s important to understand that the way feedback is so different in these organizations is not just the quantity. It’s not just that you’re getting so much of it. It’s the quality. Most feedback is more oriented to your behavior. You didn’t do this quite right. Here’s how you can get it better.

That’s not the quality of feedback in a DDO. You start out with how something didn’t work out. But the conversation is not over until we go another layer down. Why are you finding it so hard to delegate? It’s not just, hey, give the work away more, or how you can change your behavior. It’s why.

And the why starts to get into the things like Lisa’s saying of somebody saying, yeah, I want to be more collaborative. But I discover there’s also another part of me that likes being the smartest little boy in the room, or wants to be the star of the show, or the one who’s going to get all the credit And it’s only when you get to that level of the exploration in the feedback, where you’re not just talking about how you can change your behavior, but why, that you start uncovering these things, like you’re calling the blind spot. And then, of course, they’re not blind anymore.

And as Lisa says, they’re not sources of shame. It’s not like, OK, we’ve we got you. Now you have to go sit in a corner. Now you’re some bad person. On the contrary, it’s like now you are more fully yourself at work. If this is a thing that interests you, or this is a thing you want to be able to work at, what people often say is, I get to be my whole self at work. I’m not one person at work and somebody else when I leave.

LISA LAHEY: This goes back to the performance distinction that Bob was making before. If you’re going to really grow, the point is to not keep having the same job that you can do over and over again and really show how terrific you are at it. If somebody who is above you can see this is the thing you’re working on and can see that, oh, there’s a next job that you could have that is really going to be a stretch for you, wouldn’t that really be a more powerful source for your development?

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: I’m glad you came back to that, because that was a great turn of phrase and a great point about performance versus practice. Because we talk so much at HBR about measuring performance and high performance. And then you’re like, it’s a performance. I was like, oh, yeah. I get that.

ROBERT KEGAN: Yeah, exactly. These organizations are– and I should stress this as well– from a very conventional notion of business success. They are three very, very successful businesses, which we were quite happy about. Because we didn’t want people to say, oh, yeah, these could be fabulous places for people to grow. But they’re going to go bankrupt, because they’re lousy businesses.

So these organizations are very high-performing by not being so performance-oriented as they are practice-oriented. It’s leading culture as itself a kind of strategy. It’s a willingness in the leader to be vulnerable herself or himself and model what we’re trying to do here, that we’re all learners. That we’re essentially trying to create a whole different way of being at work. And where people development and business success are not considered two valuable goals but really two parts of a single kind of thing.

I know when we talk about this that there is a certain group of people who find it inspiring. And there’s another group who find it kind of alarming and off-putting. And I think both reactions are completely understandable. Because it is presenting a whole different picture, a whole different way of working.

But one of the things I’m always reminded of is that 50, 60 years ago, when I was a kid growing up in Minnesota, there was a guy in our neighborhood who came home from work every day, changed out of his business suit into gym shorts and a tank top, bounded out of his house and proceeded to run around the neighborhood to the amazement of everyone. Because no one– not man, woman, or child– had ever seen a person do such a thing. The word “jogger” didn’t exist in anyone’s vocabulary 50 years ago.

As kids, we got the message very clearly from our parents– stay away from this guy. Somebody who will run around, as my father would say, for no purpose other than just to run and half naked? Who knows what such a person will do?

So these organizations, people are interested in them, and they should be, but not because they’re a weirdo in the neighborhood. I think these organizations might be like that jogger 50 years ago, a messenger from the future about what work can be like.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Bob and Lisa, thank you again so much for coming in today.

LISA LAHEY: Thank you.

ROBERT KEGAN: Good talking with you.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: That was Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey, both of Harvard University. And the book is called An Everyone Culture. For more, go to hbr.org.